"Singing" Chinese

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I attended a six-week intensive Mandarin class at the China Institute in New York City this past summer.  It was my first-ever Chinese course, and I hadn't studied a new foreign language in thirty years.  I knew that my 60-year-old brain was going to be challenged, and, as expected, this part of my aging body--like so many others--simply isn't what it used to be.  So I just had to work twice as hard to barely keep up with the majority of the rest of the twenty students who were young enough to be my children.

I found it quite fascinating when I realized that there is a little corner of my brain where foreign languages are stored.  It seems that, since I was trying to pack something brand new into that dusty little corner, it got all stirred up and I started to dream in Russian or German again--something that hadn't happened in years.

It took me weeks to stop processing the Chinese word for "you" as the Russian word that throws a sentence into the negative.  And, to this day, I still hear words from other languages as I eavesdrop on the Chinese being spoken all around me, but that seems to be getting less and less troublesome. The Head Instructor at the China Institute introduced the course by telling us that Chinese involved singing and painting. "Singing" I could handle, thanks to a great upbringing on my Mother's lap.  But he didn't accept an inability to carry a tune as an impediment to learning Chinese, either, in answer to a self-described tone-deaf fellow-student.

"Painting" I'll leave as the subject for another day.  Right now, let's see what he meant by "singing."

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